▶ "I've made a lot of stupid action films. But when we made The Matrix, we saw that people wanted more than that."; "I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible."; "You think you know her. Just wait and see the change. I'll have her trained in no time."; "At this rate, I'll live forever."; "It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose."; …"Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan; you just hope for it."; "If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is unnecessary. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless."; "Don't let your fear paralyze you. Prepare yourself not only technically, but also emotionally."; "Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough."; "You got good and bad people everywhere."; "They been callin up here, asking when I am gonna get out. When I hit bricks, it all belongs to me."; "The best revenge in the world is success."; "Prison make you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster."; "Of all the artists on Death Row, none of them went bankrupt."; "No person ever gave me nothing but God."; "My kids get everything they want and are raised well."; "In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you."; "If I stay in here until I am 100 years olds, I will still be a man."; "I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time."; "How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?"; "Basically, people are never happy enough because they want more money."; "You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience."; "Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain."; "Imagery is like music."; "I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment."; "Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience."; "Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired."; "Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images."; "Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words."; "When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made - no matter how low the budget - got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release."; "Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business!"; "As a producer, I probably am a little stronger than most, since I was a director originally."; "An icon painter starts not with Jesus Christ but by finding earth and rubbing. Now what is earth, what are you rubbing in directing?"; "The public are not stupid."; "Spin Me Round was number one all over the world, everywhere. It changed the face of pop music, no question. We took technology further than Trevor Horn."; "Past is past."; "I thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba."; "I think Robbie Williams is an utter and complete prat. His last record was a pile of rubbish."; "I laughed, even if I was the butt of the joke."; "Give the public what they want. What you want is unimportant."; "Everything I touch turns to gold."; "Everybody likes a roller coaster ride."; "The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people."; "During the Sixties, the Americans thought I was the greatest thing in the history of cinema."; "A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say."; "You need cliches. Cliches are what people respond to."; "You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book."; "Some people are directors and I think they should stay behind the camera."; "Music is half the film."; "I will never sign anything which makes me have to do more than one film."; "I think you should make a movie that has an audience."; "I think music is what takes the experience off the screen into your soul, into your head."; "I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books."; "I like doing as many special effects in camera, as much as possible."; "Crime, money, power, drugs - are all linked."; "Cliches are what make you understand something."; "Being a producer, I deal with a lot of different directors, and some of them would drive me insane with all the different histrionics, and the mystique that they carry."; "And writing I think is a gift that you have, the same as acting, in a way."; "You can make fun of everything."; "We were the only ones interested in comedy. Everybody else wanted to be Martin Scorsese."; "There are good characters and bad characters."; "Sometimes the wheel turns slowly, but it turns."; "You tend to meet on a more regular basis with people in your industry, and reality being what it is, you tend to meet with them at the particular level that you occupy; so that develops a fraternity relationship."; "Well, it was a typical meeting with the President. He was very gracious, very outgoing."; "We had an interesting thing at that first dinner. It was prior to the availability of several new hotels in Los Angeles, and we were more or less committed to the old Ambassador Hotel that has the famous Coconut Grove."; "Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be."; "That room was not available, and the only other room had been booked for a Jewish bar mitzvah. I called the father and told him I needed the room and I would pay him to move the bar mitzvah to an adjoining room which was smaller."; "President Johnson offered the middle of the road."; "I think the executives have matured enough so that they recognize that we have a two-party system. In California, we have more than a two-party system."; "I believe Johnson understood that the reason was Vietnam. I also believe that he felt that if there was a way to communicate the real issues in Vietnam, that the reasons would be answered or understood. But there was just no way to communicate."; "What you hope for, like Unforgiven did a lot to give you a chance to do it again sometime."; "The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that."; "That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style."; "I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that."; "I tell you, I feel like a real novice as far as horror goes."; "I mean, I really liked those guys and the experience of doing Raiders was really good for me, but I did not really want to be involved - I only did Jedi, as I really owed George a favor."; "I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place."; "Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life."; "Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western."; "Almost every other Western in the last ten years has failed, since Dances with Wolves."; "You have to act like a responsible professional in the industry regardless of your age."; "Year Two is a critical year for any television show."; "There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama."; "The support that we have from the network in terms of watching us at an unusual time in the year and playing our episodes three times in a given week until we built an audience... is exceptional."; "The girls in high school who watched 90210? I was watching Seinfeld."; "The best years are behind me."; "If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone."; "I want every character be an outsider in some way."; "I think our show is very different from Orange County."; "I am the kind of person that takes everything as is and then look at it from the outside looking in."; "Certainly the experiences of Seth and his relationship to his parents and his point of view of the world are very similar to my own and very much based on my experiences at the University of Southern California."; "As The O.C. started up again, I started to feel myself potentially getting pulled away."; "You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough."; "The entire exhibitions industry in the United States of America has filed for bankruptcy."; "Since we made Shrek in the digital format, you actually can see it in its purest form digitally."; "Shrek is not like anything anybody has ever seen before."; "It was the business that made Pop go away, not our inability to create."; "Inspiration comes from all different places."; "I love to look at The Graduate, or Lawrence of Arabia, or things I had nothing to do with. But you could not get me to go back and watch movies that it was a privilege just to be around them when they were being made."; "I know what we do really well - I just try and keep us focused on doing that."; "I have a very difficult time getting the Napster world."; "What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it."; "Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so."; "Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy."; "I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny."; "I took some time out for life."; "I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real."; "I have a lot of nightmares."; "I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy."; "The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language."; "People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives."; "On the Internet, inside information is currency, and there will always be counterfeiters among us."; "No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever."; "My philosophy: find what it is you want to say, walk in the room, say it, and get the hell out."; "If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do."; "All love is unrequited. All of it."; "Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there."; "Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India."; "We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie."; "This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one."; "The mixture of the Trinidadian people and the Indian people has caused a new culture to emerge."; "I feel very proud that we have managed to stay together. In these forty years we have made forty-six films. Each one has brought a certain name and contribution to cinema."; "I shall give you hunger, and pain, and sleepless nights. Also beauty, and satisfactions known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these you shall have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold."; "Every so often, we pass laws repealing human nature."; "They keep the old business. We keep the ongoing business."; "Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious."; "The disco sound, you must see, is not art or anything so serious."; "Phil Ramone is very special. Barbra Streisand or Diana Ross... they are the best."; "Nowadays you need so much money to be able to launch a new artist, notably in America; you would hardly believe the sums involved."; "My music was typically continental - nothing like, say, The Beatles."; "It is at least 10 times more difficult to get a good synthesiser sound than on an acoustic instrument."; "In pop or rock you can make a fast song or a slow one, but in disco there is really just the one rhythm."; "In both pop and disco, the meaning of the lyrics is not too important. I have nothing I feel I particularly want to say."; "I would not be happy to do what I do unless I felt that the large audience wanted it."; "I think it would be stupid for us to try and tell people who are dancing in a discotheque about the problems of the world. That is the very thing they have come away to avoid."; "I have to admit, I do not listen to much rock music."; "I am reluctant to judge things without being informed."; "I am not so complicated or intelligent a composer, nor am I very interested in becoming so. I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do."; "I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do."; "I am certainly not racist; I even like the British."; "I achieved something specially different with Love To Love You Baby and I Feel Love. These songs will endure."; "Every business is there to make money, and making a record is business. This tends to be forgotten by many."; "Disco is music for dancing, and people will always want to dance."; "Disco does work better with black artists or players. They just feel it more."; "What I was trying to convey there was the kind of waste land that was left after the war. It was a bit like one always thinks of war, you know, stark scenery and no birds, no trees, no leaves, nothing living. And just emptiness."; "Well, again working strictly to the film, where you had this lovely, lovely land of brightness and color. And everybody is smiling and happy and butterflies flitting around and it was that kind of image that, it was like a dream world, really."; "He was definitely a father figure for all of us. Once you were a Giant, you were always a Giant."; "It is reassuring for people to feel they have a boss, someone who knows the answers and has charted the course."; "If she was a victim of any kind, she was a victim of her friends."; "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."; "Time is the fire in which we burn."; "These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission... to boldly go where no man has gone before."; "A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away."; "The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap, and they know it."; "Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries."; "Not only may she unconsciously register a favorable impression with my associates and me, but she may also suggest something by her work that will lead to some new and novel feature in a forthcoming production."; "Let us hope that for many it does mean the end of trouble so far as earning a livelihood is concerned, that it means happy and comfortable home living honestly earned. But there are other troubles ahead for her, and plenty of hard work."; "It is the task of several months and it is a fact that a girl, either while rehearsing or actually playing, may be training for some character or feature in some future production not yet definitely fixed even in my own mind."; "How little the public realizes what a girl must go through before she finally appears before the spotlight that is thrown upon the stage."; "Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!"; "But it is only through constant, faithful endeavor by the girl herself that the goal eventually is reached."; "Beauty, of course, is the most important requirement and the paramount asset of the applicant."; "And, I may add, from what totally unexpected sources come many of those who from the comparatively modest beginning in the chorus rise to the heights of really great achievement in the theatrical profession."; "The true portrait of a man is a fusion of what he thinks he is, what others think he is, what he really is and what he tries to be."; "I plan to die at my desk."; "I can tell you categorically that we at 60 Minutes did not pay Michael Jackson one cent."; "He can thread a needle with a well-turned phrase."; "Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business."; "I could never do a show, or be a personality like Howard Stern, where you take all that heat from critics. What he does, he does, but the critical heat would crucify me."; "Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."; "When you consider all the stars I have managed, mere submarines make me smile."; "This little ship you sent is more wonderful than the big one that takes me away from you."; "The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication."; "Most of us serve our ideals by fits and starts. The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication."; "It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law."; "They want to let the audience figure things out and let the reaction shot get the laugh."; "These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school."; "Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept. I had to explain to him that it was a comedy."; "It felt scary because there was no auditioning, no rehearsing."; "I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews."; "You have to believe. You have to stick to your guns."; "Speak slowly, Michael. He is an honourable man."; "It is absolutely my conviction, that Walter Salles will figure among the great directors of our time."; "I chose Sony Classics, not just because of their practical experience, not just because of their wisdom in marketing, but mainly because of their integrity."; "You know what shows today are missing? Stars."; "When we did Dynasty, it was the clothes. I think the clothes affected every woman around the world. I got so many letters, I think we made the designer a millionaire!"; "One thing my wife says is bad about me, is that I still care too much."; "I love my wife, she deserves anything and everything."; "Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright."; "Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word "census," and people fall asleep."; "A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated."; "Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."; "Art, in the first place, has to connect with yourself."; "Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?"; "When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy."; "We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax."; "The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying."; "The reason so many people turned up at his funeral is that they wanted to make sure he was dead."; "The harder I work, the luckier I get."; "Television has raised writing to a new low."
Facts
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